“Fuck the mother of anyone who eats with this Nazi,” “I hope you choke on your food and die,” “If there weren’t cameras, I would break your face,” and “You’re a Nazi because you care about the children of Gaza.”
These were the phrases that met the Israeli writer Gideon Levy when he went with his family to a famous shawarma restaurant in the center of the city of Or Yehuda in Tel Aviv, and his son had suggested to him the restaurant that he had written during his military service in the Israeli army.
According to the article published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, protests and insults rose above the family’s seating area, and people surrounded the table, demanding that the restaurant expel Levy, who rushed with his family to the car for fear of “the escalating atmosphere of violence in the place.”
Levy said – in his article – that the situation did not surprise him, and this was not the first or last time he was exposed to a situation like this, or in which people described him as a Nazi, for his objection to “the war crimes committed by Israel against civilians in Gaza.”
In particular, the writer was not surprised that such behavior would come from the people of a city that has a street named after Jonathan (Yoni) Netanyahu, brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and a restaurant called “Entebbe Meeting Point,” in reference to the Entebbe operation that took place in 1976 at the Ugandan airport in Entebbe and carried His name was Jonathan, and he died there.
The writer denied the media’s manifestations of division in Israeli society, pointing out that Israel is united in its unconditional support for the army “to do whatever it wants in Gaza,” even with the accumulation of war crimes.
Levy stressed that this is the first war in the history of Israel that the majority of Israeli society agrees on to this degree, as previous wars faced opposition that had political repercussions, including the Lebanon War in 1982, Operation Cast Lead in 2008, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014.
But things were different in this war, according to the writer, as public opinion agreed on the necessity of reaching a deal that would return the prisoners or stop the shooting, not for the sake of the people of Gaza, but for the sake of the prisoners and soldiers, and there was no mention of the victims of Gaza.
Therefore, the new definition of a Nazi – in the opinion of the article – is a person who cares about the victim and the children of Gaza.